In US collegiate athletics, the esteemed Pac-12 Conference sees twelve teams from the Western States compete across 24 sports in a battle to secure their spot in the NCAA Regional Tournament. Led by Head Coach, Amy Hogue, the Utah Utes Softball team entered the 2023 Spring Season hungry and ready to take their performance to the next level after. After a series of successful seasons developing a culture to elevate team performance and draw in quality recruits, the results speak for themselves.
After defeating the University of Washington in the Pac-12 semi-finals, the team had a serious challenge ahead of them as they entered the grand final against UCLA.
In a game characterized by spectacular athleticism; loaded bases, stellar home runs, diving catches, and unfortunate injuries, Utah’s reserves played a starring role. After losing two of their star players to injury in the third inning, the team’s reserves bought unparalleled determination to upset the UCLA Bruins’ 25-game win streak and claim the first-ever Pac-12 Softball Tournament Championship, ensuring their spot in the NCAA Regionals Tournament
Reflecting on the events of the game, Amy shared why the team’s culture, galvanised by a devastating loss the previous year, positioned them to perform above expectations and rely on every team member.
“I think our season was the perfect storm in all the good senses, usually we use storm in the negative, but it was the perfect storm in all the positives. The girls talked about being the first winner of the first-ever Pac-12 Conference. They said it out loud, which to me says they’re willing to risk looking silly. You don’t say that stuff out loud if you’re picked to finish eighth, but they believed in themselves. They said it out loud and they went and just did that.”
Backtracking to a defining moment for the team, Amy recalled their mood when they were excluded from the final eight, denying them a place in the NCAA National Championship finals the previous season. Explaining that they had gathered together for the announcement of the final bracket, knowing they were going to be on the cusp of going or not going, Amy said,
“If we’re going to deal with the heartbreak, we want to be together to do that.”
Being one of the first teams dropped from the bracket, and witnessing other teams they believed they were as good as make it in, Amy believes was the beginning of the perfect storm in motion.
She elaborated,
“If they didn’t believe they were good enough to be a final eight team before, they did as soon as they watched those teams do it. They were dissatisfied enough to say, ‘Alright, what have we got to do to make this right?’ They were challenged to rethink whether they were doing everything they could to make sure this day didn’t ever happen to them again.”
“That moment needed to happen. When they stated that they wanted to be in the final eight, it was clear they needed to up their game in every level and it started that day.”
She elaborated,
“If they didn’t believe they were good enough to be a final eight team before, they did as soon as they watched those teams do it. They were dissatisfied enough to say, ‘Alright, what have we got to do to make this right?’ They were challenged to rethink whether they were doing everything they could to make sure this day didn’t ever happen to them again.”
“That moment needed to happen. When they stated that they wanted to be in the final eight, it was clear they needed to up their game in every level and it started that day.”
Amy and her team have been working with Athlete Assessments for multiple seasons now, focusing on strengthening team culture, working on role definition, self-belief, and annually profiling new players to build self and team awareness through the use of Athlete Assessments’ DISC Profiles.
While the profiling happens online, Amy highlights the value in the debriefing the results as a team. This is where Athlete Assessments’ Founder and Lead Consultant, 4x Olympic and 3x Olympic Medalist, Bo Hanson, unpacks the team’s DISC Profile results, providing insight into what they mean for the team, on an individual level, and how they can leverage their DISC Profile to can enhance both personal and team performance.
Amy explained,
“At our team retreat Bo usually shows up for at least an hour. He tells us who we are and what he knows about us before he’s even met everyone because he reads our assessments, and he’s always spot on!”
“It’s always been an important part for me to find out who they are off the field first once they get to us. Because I’ve been doing a lot of watching them play, and now I get to really know them and know how to integrate both, so that I can be the best coach for them that I can.”
Accountability is the cornerstone of the Utes’ culture, where internal standards and leadership provide a mutual understanding as to when the team needs to step up. In the past, Amy has stated that a team’s performance should not be coach led. Elaborating on this ethos, she explained,
“All of our program is player led, inspirational talks, things that they want, even when new athletes arrive, they get assigned a buddy so that nobody is moving in alone.”
We’ve previously written an article about the Utah Utes’ culture, specifically on their drivers for accountability. Read it here.
Amy emphasized the impact and role her assistant coaches, Paige Parker, DJ Gasso, Courtney Martinez, and Kaija Gibson (the newest member of the Utes coaching staff) played in the team’s preparation and success. Expanding on the inner workings of the program and some of the initiatives they put in place,
“My assistant coaches pitched this idea of a physical program to me, they used to do a similar challenge at Oklahoma [where they coached previously], who have won four of the last six NCAA National Championships. At first, I thought it was crazy, I thought it was way too hard for the team. Yet without even putting an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, I just made it run on – ‘The challenge is probably too hard and yes we should do it’.”
“My assistant coaches pitched this idea of a physical program to me, they used to do a similar challenge at Oklahoma [where they coached previously], who have won four of the last six NCAA National Championships. At first, I thought it was crazy, I thought it was way too hard for the team. Yet without even putting an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, I just made it run on – ‘The challenge is probably too hard and yes we should do it’.”
“I trusted that they had a better perspective on what it looked like train for finals than me. I hadn’t made it that far in a long time, even though I’d watched other teams do it, I hadn’t been in that mindset as recently as my assistant coaches had. I put a lot of trust in them and honestly, I think the physical program they developed led us to believe we weren’t afraid of anything.”
So it was decided that within the Utes’ physical program, the ‘11-76 Challenge’ would be implemented in the offseason, seeing players undertake a series of gruelling workouts. That number — 1,176 — is the distance in miles from Utah’s Dumke Family Softball Stadium to the Hall of Fame Softball Stadium in Oklahoma City, the site of the Women’s College World Series (WCWS).
Reflecting on the 11-76 Challenge, one player noted,
“We’d start on our turf field and do exercises across the field and then once we got to one spot, we would do a core exercise, then run back. It was a lot of back and forth. Then we’d have to run into our weight room, do a weight circuit, run back to the turf field, run three laps of the track. Our last lap we had to hold a 5kg medicine ball and run with it. Then we ran back to our softball field and the workout was complete once we touched the home plate. I really feel like this showed us we could push ourselves to a higher level, a newer level that we weren’t doing in the past.”
Every milestone of the 11-76 Challenge had a meaning, every target represented a significant moment in the team’s history, and no story was more important than the meaning of the team’s theme for the year, ‘Step over the Line.’
Explaining further, Amy said,
“Step over the line was exactly what the girls did at the very end after they finished their challenge. Everything was about stepping over the line to do one more thing, one more hard, one more that we’ve not done before. Step over the line became a theme.”
“Everything became next level, even our retreat was better because everyone was more engaged. They put their phones away, there was a lot more reaching across the table when it became hard, when we’d have an injury, when you had to hand it off to the next athlete. There wasn’t a sense of ‘I’ve got to be the guy’. It was about willing to be whatever you needed to be for the team which meant realizing, ‘I may play a back-up role to you, or if you get hurt, I’m out there doing it until you get better.’ We just had a resilience about us, there was no getting in our way.””
“Everything became next level, even our retreat was better because everyone was more engaged. They put their phones away, there was a lot more reaching across the table when it became hard, when we’d have an injury, when you had to hand it off to the next athlete. There wasn’t a sense of ‘I’ve got to be the guy’. It was about willing to be whatever you needed to be for the team which meant realising, ‘I may play a back-up role to you, or if you get hurt, I’m out there doing it until you get better.’ We just had a resilience about us, there was no getting in our way.”
The Utes’ humility and reliance on one another, is clearly role modelled from attitudes which enable the coaching team to leverage each other’s experience and expertise. Amy described the team’s increasing requests for what they called ‘CP Talks’ saying,
“From the minute the team decided they were going to the final eight, they wanted to hear what that looked like, what it felt like from someone who’d been there themselves.”
CP Talks were sessions when Amy’s assistant, Coach Paige, a former player who had made the final eight every year in her collegiate softball career, won national titles, and was an All-American player, inspired the team with her experience. Paige’s talks became weekly as the team edged closer to the final series.
Reflecting on the journey that lead to their extraordinary performance in the Pac-12 Conference Final, Amy shared,
“Everyone’s contribution counted. We got through 11-76 together, because the team believed in themselves, they had been through tough times before, and on game day everyone performed to the same standards.”
“We literally got on a flight for the NCAA Tournament less than 24 hours after we hoisted the Pac-12 trophy. Everything seemed like it was sped up. We were tough, we were resilient, but we just got outplayed in the end, but at the end of the day, the year was all about how do you handle adversity starting with the day we didn’t get into the bracket the year prior, and all the way till the last day we played. It grew them immensely, and I couldn’t have been more proud of what they did with what they were presented with all along the way.”
The Utes’ 2023 season journey highlights the importance of recognizing dissatisfaction in order to build and establish long-lasting resilience. Whilst losing is always tough, it is what we do in the moments, weeks, and months leading up to and following that matter. The team’s demonstration of this is proof that the adversity we encounter is only half the story, and how we rise to the challenge of that adversity, gives us the power to impact future performance. You know what they say, the comeback is always greater than the setback!
Biography for Coach Amy Hogue
Amy Hogue is in her 14th season as head coach at her alma mater in 2021, and her 22nd season affiliated with the Utah Softball program. In 2020, she was inducted into the Utah Athletics Hall of Fame, and has made an incredible impact on the program as a student-athlete (1991-94), assistant coach (1996-99) and head coach (2008-present). Amy Hogue, the 2015 Pac-12 Coach of the Year, has led the Utes to three consecutive NCAA Tournament berths from 2015-2017, including back-to-back Super Regionals for the first time in program history (2016, 2017).
As standout performer for the Utes from 1991-1994, Hogue earned second team All-America honors and WAC Player of the Year as a senior. Before becoming Utah’s head coach, Coach Hogue built and mentored Salt Lake Community College’s program from 1999-2004. She briefly played professional softball after her career at Utah, touring with the WPF Storm, and was later drafted and signed to play with Durham Dragons. Coach Hogue graduated from Utah in 1994 with a sociology degree and earned a Masters from Utah in social work in 1996.
Biography for
Coach Amy Hogue
Amy Hogue is in her 14th season as head coach at her alma mater in 2021, and her 22nd season affiliated with the Utah Softball program. In 2020, she was inducted into the Utah Athletics Hall of Fame, and has made an incredible impact on the program as a student-athlete (1991-94), assistant coach (1996-99) and head coach (2008-present). Amy Hogue, the 2015 Pac-12 Coach of the Year, has led the Utes to three consecutive NCAA Tournament berths from 2015-2017, including back-to-back Super Regionals for the first time in program history (2016, 2017).
As standout performer for the Utes from 1991-1994, Hogue earned second team All-America honors and WAC Player of the Year as a senior. Before becoming Utah’s head coach, Coach Hogue built and mentored Salt Lake Community College’s program from 1999-2004. She briefly played professional softball after her career at Utah, touring with the WPF Storm, and was later drafted and signed to play with Durham Dragons. Coach Hogue graduated from Utah in 1994 with a sociology degree and earned a Masters from Utah in social work in 1996.
Where to from here?
Development isn’t a place we arrive at; it is a constant process we remain in. As coaches, we review and re-visit what we do and the way we do things. If, like Coach Amy Hogue, people rely on you to bring them reliable and quality tools to facilitate the development process, we encourage you to explore our suite of DISC Profiles and free online resources. If what you read gives rise to any questions, or we can help you perform at your best, don’t hesitate to reach out and contact us!
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